Meaning – The term ‘Houston Automatic Spooling Program’, refers to the computer program that provides supplementary job management, data management, and task management functions, such as control of job flow, ordering of tasks, and spooling.
HASP was developed by IBM Federal Systems Division contractors at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. The developers were Tom Simpson and Bob Crabtree. HASP was a program that ran on a mainframe and performs functions such as scheduling, control of job flow, spooling and printing/punching. HASP had no support for IBM System/360 Operating System Remote Job Entry, 360S-RC-536, but provided roughly equivalent facilities of its own.
The program was sometimes referred to under various other names, but there is no indication of IBM ever using them in official documents.
Example of usage – “HASP supported IBM terminals such as 2770, 2780, and 3780, but additionally provided support for multi-leaving communication with intelligent workstations such as the IBM 1130 and the System/360 Model 20.”
